He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of connecting with nature through love to truly understand it.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel's quote suggests that a deep appreciation and familiarity with nature can only be achieved through love. This connection allows individuals to engage more profoundly with the natural world, fostering a greater understanding of its beauty and complexity.
In practice
During a nature retreat, I shared this quote to inspire participants to cultivate a love for the outdoors.
Prudishness is pretense of innocence without innocence. Women have to remain prudish as long as men are sentimental, dense, and evil enough to demand of them eternal innocence and lack of education. For innocence is the only thing which can ennoble lack of education.
A classical work doesn't ever have to be understood entirely. But those who are educated and who are still educating themselves must desire to learn more and more from it.
If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry.
Religion can emerge in all forms of feeling: here wild anger, there the sweetest pain; here consuming hatred, there the childlike smile of serene humility.
A priest is he who lives solely in the realm of the invisible, for whom all that is visible has only the truth of an allegory.
Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.
Nature teaches beasts to know their friends.
Plants of great vigor will almost always struggle into blossom, despite impediments. But there should be encouragement, and a free genial atmosphere for those of more timid sort, fair play for each in its own kind.
Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
Every animal that walks the earth, or swims, or flies is precious beyond description, something so rare and wonderful that it equals the stars or the ocean or the mind of man.
You would have thought that our first priority would be to ask what the ecologists are finding out, because we have to live within the conditions and principles they define. Instead, we've elevated the economy above ecology.
I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone's away. There's something very sensuous about it - overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.
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